"We're meeting all sorts of people, like Steps, who were really nice to us."

Truth be told, Claire Freeland is arguably, after Hear'Say, the best known face from Popstars.

Most agreed she had the best voice of the lot but the fact she was plumper than most, she knew, would go against her.

"I had no high expectations," says Claire, who went for the Popstars audition, her first ever, only at the insistence of her mum, Marion.

After her appearances on two shows, the offers started to pour in. But Claire wanted to take control of things from the start.

No signing of multi-million pound deals like those with Hear'Say and Popstars rejects Liberty for her, although she could quite easily have gone down that route.

"You're selling your soul to the devil, really," she says in her broad Lanarkshire accent.

"I would never have gone down that route. They give you a huge advance and sometimes you can end up owing them money.

"You've got no control over the songs, no control over your own destiny, your own future, what you want to do.

"At the end of the day, if they give you a huge advance like #50,000, you owe them that."

So, instead, Claire set up her own record label, Statuesque.

"I didn't want to go down any kind of media route because it was going to be too synthetic and I thought to myself 'Do I really want to sign my life away for five years?'.

"I had a discussion with my manager and we decided that we had done all the leg work for this, we recorded the single, we had it written, we had free studio time at Metropolis Studios in London.

"So we already had the whole package there. All we really needed to do was get someone to distribute it and to market it.

"So we contacted some companies and got some corporate sponsorship for that and my manager knew some people who could distribute it for us.

"It was a nightmare to do, don't get me wrong. It was hard work. But it will pay off, hopefully."

A scary scenario for even the most confident wannabe though?

"It never crossed my mind to start with. People were contacting me saying they had free studio time and a producer willing to do it for free," she says.

"So we didn't need someone to come along and heavily market me. Everyone knew who I was. It is all new to me. I suppose I have learned it is a lot more work, it is a team of people who put it out, not just you.